James Elkins

News:

New book! What Heaven Looks Like. Passed the 300,000 word mark on my work in progress. Writing every day! Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. I'm using Academia.edu as a message board. If you download something of mine that's posted there, send me a note: I'm always glad to answer questions. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.

I have decided not to find a publisher forThe Impending Single History of Art.(Too many years spent pursuing academic publishers.) It's the last of my art history books, and the one with the most information about global art history. I'm going to be posting it in its entirety on this site and on Academia. The chapters are on Google Drive, so they're live and always up to date. Please send comments & criticism here.

As of autumn 2015 I no longer write or edit books or essays on art. I have arranged my teaching schedule so I have 4 or 5 days free each week. For the next four years, 2017 to 2021, l will be concentrating on a work in progress—an experimental novel with images. I have been working it, on more or less, since 2010. If I'm still around, and still working on it, I hope to try to publish it around 2022. The idea is to finish the book with no excuses or regrets: after that amount of time, whatever it is, it'll be the best I can do. There are some statistics about it in the embedded page, below.

I’m prompted to do this for two reasons. The first is that art history and related fields in the humanities have long acknowledged the fundamental position occupied by writing, which entails among other things that writing is not a neutral medium, and that there is no secure distinction between nonfiction and other kinds of writing—but few scholars have taken writing seriously in their own practice. Art historians, theorists, and critics continue to write along well-defined disciplinary paths. We cite poststructural philosophers on the idea of writing, but our own writing continues to be restricted by disciplinary expectations. The few authors who permit their writing to become more experimental (such as Barthes, Derrida, John Berger, or Hélène Cixous) tend to have their texts viewed as fiction or as sources for art history, rather than examples of art history.

One result of this is a deep disparity between the ways writing is taught and interpreted inside and outside art history. Art history, visual studies, and related fields have virtually no discourse on what might make writing interesting or challenging: we mainly praise writers who are clear, or remark on those who aren't. Meanwhile, just outside our disciplines, in literary history and criticism, there is rich literature on writing with a complex history and an enormous repertoire of strategies for reading texts. Within art history, it is as if none of that ever happened. Most of what is written under the name art history is not compelling, on account of a lack of reflection about writing itself. (What does art historical writing actually express, aside from its subject matter? For me, the average professional essay expresses the scholar's anxiety about being correct, professional, and authoritative. The scholar's anxiety or preoccupation with status provides much of the affective content of an average text. I find that once you start paying attention in this way, it can be difficult to read past art history's emotionally narrow tone, its brittle tension, and its affective fragility, to hear what might be expressed about the art.)

The second reason to leave art history is because I would like to see how well I might be able to write when I am no longer concerned about disciplinary expectations or constraints.

I'm developing two books, which I use to teach seminars at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. One looks back toward art history, and the other out at writing in general. The first is a critique of the writing in art history, intended for art historians; the second is meant as an aid to writers, including myself, who write fiction that includes images.

The first is "What is Interesting Writing in Art History?." It begins with an account of how I arrived at a place where writing counts more than content, and there's also a kind of manifesto of the importance of writing. On the same website is a discussion of what might count as interesting writing in art history, and close readings of experimental art historical writing by Alex Nemerov, Rosalind Krauss, T.J. Clark, and others, as well as writing that is not usually counted as art history, but is thought to be of potential use for art history (Derrida, Schefer, Cixous, and others). The project ends with a chapter on the theory of the essay, and another listing the institutions that teach experimental writing on art. The purpose of this first project is to help open the way to writing in art history that is informed by literary theory, and hence, I hope, more difficult, more responsive, more eloquent and flexible, and perhaps more expressive.

The second book is called "Writing with Images." It is concerned with writing (including fiction) that contains images (of any sort, usually photographs). I think of this as the general field that contains art history as a special case. This second project includes a look at books that use formatting, design, and typography in addition to images (such as artist's books); and there are close readings of texts that experiment with images, including Sebald, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, André Breton, Raymond Roussel, and a dozen others. The project includes an attempt at theory, in which I try to say all the different ways that images can work in relation to texts, from merely illustrating what's written (as in much art history) to working in unpredictable dialogue with the writing (as in Sebald). The purposes of this second project are to sketch a history of such practices, to theorize ways fiction and photographs have interacted, to expose some of the narrowness of art historical practices by contrast, and to provide material for writers at work on such texts. The project ends witha practical chapter, aimed at writers, which lists ways images can be used together with experimental writing.